The Evaluation of Brief Teacher-Implemented SEL Guides in Classroom Settings

Introduction: Recent years have seen a significant increase in the inclusion of social-emotional learning (SEL) in school curriculum. While many different curriculum are available, many require lengthy training, significant preparation time, and compete with class time devoted academic learning. To address these challenges, a SEL curriculum, Social Emotional Learning Foundations (SELF), was developed with three primary goals: lessons would be brief, lesson concepts would integrate into daily classroom activities, and brief enrichment activities would allow teachers to reinforce the SEL concepts as the classroom schedule allows.

Topics of focus for weekly lessons were derived by a common elements analysis (presented separately) of the most common CASEL core competencies found in the prevalent school-based SEL programs. Individual guides were developed to include the core components appearing in at least five of the reviewed guides. Lessons are designed to be delivered on a weekly basis. Lesson guides are script based which allows the teacher to efficiently focus their preparation time on increasing their comfort and familiarity with the material. Each lesson can be delivered in approximately 10 minutes and includes multiple lesson extensions that may be added to the initial lesson or presented at a later time, allowing flexibility in allocation of classroom time. In addition, tips for integrating the lesson topic into academic curriculum or daily student-teacher interactions are provided.

Methods: This pilot program utilizes current school mental health consultants to guide the delivery of the SELF curriculum with a subset of elementary school teachers in Baltimore County Public Schools. Teachers rate each lesson on ease of use and provide feedback on the difficulty level of integrating each topic into daily classroom schedules.

Results: We present ratings of acceptability and feasibility from a small group of teachers participating in the pilot program. Information obtained via interview provides further direction issues to be addressed for the pilot curriculum to scale to a school wide intervention.

Conclusions: We illustrate one method of developing a brief social-emotional classroom curriculum that integrates into the pre-existing classroom structure. By making the curriculum integrate into the everyday classroom teaching activities, we increase the appeal and acceptability of the curriculum to class teachers, increasing the likelihood that the curriculum will be implemented with fidelity.